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2 Positive ways to Heal Past Emotional Wounds

Take all the time you need to heal emotionally. Moving on doesn’t take a day. It takes a lot of little steps to be able to break free of your broken self.

To acknowledge emotional pain may seem like an obvious step in the healing process that everyone is already doing. If you’re in pain, you already know it, right?

No! Not always.

Many of us have a surprising amount of emotional pain in our energy field that lies below our conscious awareness.

In time we become masters at denial of emotional pain in order to function in our lives. Unconsciously we have learned how to keep the pain at bay so we can “do” our daily lives with some kind of balance. Often, this imbalanced balance within us actually causes us to create more imbalance as an attempt to gain equilibrium. And our only awareness of this might be a sense of feeling “off” or living our lives with limited inner resources, constantly looking for something outside ourselves to “fix” us.

For us to truly heal emotional pain, we need to invite it up into our conscious awareness. We need to care enough about ourselves to spend time with ourselves, looking within and truly BEING with ourselves. When we can do this, we find an infinite source of emotional support and well-being that is always available to us from within our own heart.

I was in that painful emotional phase for a very long time without even realizing it. By the time I realized it, I was questioning my very existence and purpose. Its only after a lot of emotional upheaval and introspection did I realize I was not to blame for it all. But while my healing took time and effort because I didn’t know where to start….your healing does not have to take that long. The few ways below have helped me and countless of my patients heal their lifetimes of emotional scars.

1) Acknowledge your pain

“Tend to your vital heart, and all your worry will be dissolved.” ~ Rumi

You may experience your first awareness of emotional pain as an uncomfortable physical sensation, such as tightness. Or it could be mental confusion and obsession about something. Or you could feel emotionally overwhelmed, like being pulled into a tidal wave that has you spinning and not knowing which end is up. You may be able to determine the quality of the feeling as rage, sadness, despair, etc. If not, that’s okay. Give the feeling / sensation permission to be here within you fully, whether you can describe or define it or not. Make no judgments about yourself or your process.You can’t do this wrong. Just go with whatever you are aware of and congratulate yourself for your courage and determination to let is surface and heal.

Remind yourself that anything that you’re feeling is here for a valid, real reason. As you begin to experience your emotional pain, remind yourself that there is nothing wrong with you for having this wound. Even if your current experience was triggered by something in present time, the root of it is there because there was something that happened to you in the past that caused real, genuine pain and scarring. Therefore, it is normal, natural and HEALTHY for you to feel whatever it is that you feel.

When you can acknowledge your pain, you are simplifying it for your heart to heal it too.

2) Declutter Emotionally to heal

“In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself. […] It will be a permanent Self, rooted in awareness and creativity. Once you have captured this, you have captured the world.” ~ Deepak Chopra

Emotional decluttering essentially has one rule. The rule is- If a memory or mental image doesn’t serve me positively or causes me pain its time to “let it go”. The classification is pretty simple when you think about it. If it makes you happy it stays otherwise “let it go”

How?

Well a simple way I use to remove emotional clutter is: to write that negative or painful memory on a piece of paper. While writing pour your heart out(Acknowledge your pain). Let the tears flow, the anger soar…no problem. But once you have finished writing it, tear that paper into tiny tiny bits and throw it in the bin outside your living space. That physical act of tearing the paper with the painful memory precipitates into your emotional being and starts the emotional decluttering, which ultimately leads to healing even the deepest and oldest of emotional wounds. (Please do this process in complete solitude)

Now the most important question to ask your self is this :

“Do I care enough about ME to let ME heal?”

“Healing comes when we choose to walk away from darkness and shift towards a brighter light.”

The famous saying that time heals all wounds is NOT exactly true. Time has the ability to mask old wounds, but healing takes effort and acknowledgment of the pain. Do notice that when you think about a past hurt, does it still hurt you? If yes, then time has masked your pain and you have still not healed. This is where the above 2 ways will help immensely.

You know the ways, so its just a matter of time, effort and self loving determination. Emotional healing is a HUGE step in transforming yourself into the person you were truly meant to be…because believe it or not, all those emotional scars inside have a way of weighing us down and preventing our flight.

Let it all out and let yourself heal. You will be SO glad you did. You CAN do it!

And if you are still feeling stuck and need a helping hand to get you started, I am here to positively counsel and help you heal. Just drop me a note by clicking here.

Now its your turn… Do you have any special ways of emotional healing? Do you agree with what I have said above? Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments below. I would love to learn from you and so would all the other readers. Who knows, your healing experience might help another heart heal too.

28 thoughts on “2 Positive ways to Heal Past Emotional Wounds”

Zeenat- I identify with your words. It took years for me to let the pain I was feeling come to the surface and giving it a place in my psyche. I learned to lean into it while I was working on it – rather than feeling shame and pushing it under the rug. xxoo

Dear Fran,
The shoving the pain under the rug is our biggest coping mechanism….but is infact highly detrimental to our personal growth and happiness. I’m so glad you are already leaning into healing constantly now.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom here.
Much Love~

Dear Zeenat,
What an insightful and healing article you’ve written. Thank you for sharing your expertise in this area with us.
And what you say is so true….we can acknowledge the pain and bring it up from the depths of consciousness but until it loses its power over us – we have not cleared the painful memory.

Dear Angela,
I agree with you completely…we need to let the pain go in order to be complete free from it. The second way of writing it down, tearing the bits and throwing it, has an amazing effect on this.
It takes time and persistence to let it all go.
So glad you liked this post. Thank you for sharing your wonderful thoughts here.
Much Love~

So true Zeenat…I’ve learned to ‘release’ things as I go through my day…not 100% but better than before. Usually when there’s something we’re holding on to, it’ll keep popping up wearing different clothes. Letting the pain go releases more than our emotions, it’s a release for the very cells of our body.

Hi Elle,
Thats so so true! Holding on to pain is toxic at every stage of our life. Letting go as you said is healing to every cell of our body. I love how you went to the cell level here🙂
Thank you for your loving comment here.
Much Love~

Darling Swathi,
I know the debilitating feeling when pain controls all parts of your life….So please do try the methods and email me if you need to talk more. I’m always here for you.
Thank you for your lovely comment here.
Much Love~

Zeenat – thank you for this post to help with healing. Before getting to de-cluttering, the acknowledgment of pain and hurt is important. I try not to acknowledge it because working through it causes even more pain. So sometimes we don’t want to admit our emotional wounds because working on those wounds will just hurt more.

But as you point out, realizing and accepting we have emotional wounds is the very first step in healing. It’s important to acknowledge our pain in a non-judgmental or self-loathing way but view the pain as a way to grow and develop as people. Also for some of us, with emotional wounds, we have to have a daily plan for healing. It’s not a one day process – can take months or years and we should implement these practices in our life every day.

Hi Vishnu,
Healing does take time…that is for sure. But a conscious effort to let it heal every-time those feelings come up is very important. It will take time, effort and persistence…but it can be done and I am living proof of it.
Try the above ways and see how you start feeling lighter from the very first time you tear those bits.
Thank you for your insightful comment here.
Much Love~

I love the idea of pouring our hurts out on paper, then tearing that paper up and getting rid of it. What a great way to acknowledge the pain and begin to let it out and let it go!
Healing IS a conscious process. We must be willing to feel and recognize our pain for what it is before we can move to the next step and the next and the next . . .
Wonderful advice, Zeenat! Thank you!

Hi Martha,
Having personally tried and used the bits of paper practice…I can vouch for its positive effects in letting go of pain. Often we dont know where to begin healing….this is a great beginning.
So glad you liked this post. Thank you for your lovely thoughts here.
Much love~

I am consistently surprised by how difficult it can be to attend to the first step: Acknowledge your pain. We are conditioned from day one to move away from our pain and suffering and only listen to it when it reaches a certain high threshold. Becoming present to the landscape of pain has been a profound experience for me. You would think that to become aware of the pain would make it worse but I have had the opposite experience (and I watch my clients have the same) – once acknowledged the pain gives us the information to heal and practicing being with what is makes us incredibly courageous and powerful.

Hi Kate,
I completely agree with you….
When we acknowledge our pain it’s like we have won half the battle we have been fighting with our on self. It can be incredibly healing…and as you say can give immense inner power.
Thank you for stopping by and sharing your experience here.
Much love~

Zeenat, I always have an obsession over SOMETHING, so perhaps I have A LOT of emotional pain to be acknowledging!

Joking aside, I absolutely see how denial of it can last a very long time. For me, it’s always something small, that has a friend join it, and before long, I am literally looking for an escape route with no idea where it came from. And then it all seems a little ‘first world problems’ since it’s nothing significant so why worry about it.

But of course this is all about taking care of your head and heart. And as you quit rightly write, do I care enough about me?

Hi Razwana,
My obsessions are all over the place too girl…so you have company in that’s department😉
But caring enough about yourself starts with the thoughts we create everyday. Banishing those negative thoughts takes practice.
Thank you for stopping by and sharing your awesome thoughts here. Love seeing your smile here.
Much love~

Great article, Zeenat. I have a website and products designed to help people control their bad habits – more specifically alcohol abuse – and I’m always looking for websites and messages to share with people to give them some strategies to take positive action. I find that many people get stuck in a rut, using substances to stuff emotional pain or baggage instead of dealing with the issue.
I’m grateful that I found your site to enjoy myself and to share with others.
Liz Michael

Hi, thank you a lot for this post. I’ve been looking for ways to let go of old stuff and the paper exercise seems really helpful.

After completing it, how should one proceed in dealing with persistent memories and thoughts? It’s difficult not to continue thinking and feeling sad about past situations when their consequences are still affecting your life, I feel those memories and thoughts all day everyday in the background, even if I’m not consciously thinking about them.

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